Monday, 29 December 2008

I work in IT, its an indoor job so no heavy lifting, but it does mean if you don't watch your pie intake you do start to put the weight on. So I headed off down to ASDA and there are just tons of celebs that have done their own keep fit video just in time for christmas - wierd that, bringing out a fitness dvd before christmas, who's going to actually do the video? you've got your hands full of turkey sandwiches, grease and roast potatoes and far too much lager. You probably couldn't even move your finger towards the remote control, I spend the whole of November training squirrels for this very reason.

Anyway, I found the DVD I wanted, and I thought to myself, "Now that's the body that I want, I want to look like that, and I'll do the dvd every day for a decade to get it, if I have to, if I have to cycle to the moon and back I'll do it" I've been doing this dvd for just over a fucking year now, and I still haven't got Davinas tits.

Looks like I'll have to start rubbing my chest with toilet roll for the next 5 years to make my chest bigger, after all, its worked on my arse for the last 20 odd years.

Monday, 22 December 2008

First up Merry Christmas and a happy new year to you all. Now on with the diatribe....

It must be Christmas! You can tell just by watching telly, or listening to the radio for all those repeat hits from 30 odd years ago, or walking round your home town, looking at the absolutely pointless, useless, glittering, power-eating, half dead, pigeon-shit infested, glittery, building appendages, cunningly called "decorations" so that the council can be proud of them.

But, above all this it's the adverts isn't it? I'm not talking about the toy ones, although they can Fuck Off for all I care. No. I'm talking about those sodding charity adverts. Bollocks to them. I do have a favourite one though. Adopt a Tiger. Yes, I want some of that action! I want to ring them and say:"Yes! I'd love to adopt a Tiger...donation? Yeah, put me down for a tenner, now....when are you going to deliver it?"and just wait for their response.

Or there's that other one....Sponsor a Dog. Why? What the fuck is a dog going to do that I would want to sponsor it? Skydive? Actually that I'd pay to see, especially if it has spectacularly long ears. But you see my point. Just because it's Christmas doesn't mean that I am more likely to put my hand in my pocket. I'll give when I want to, to the causes I want to support. I don't need a guilt trip advert about some Pandas who have been abused. We know these Pandas are out there. We know they need help, and when I have a few quid I'll give some money, but I'm certainly not going to if 5 seperate fucking charities continue to force-feed me guilt-trips in the middle of "Blackadders Christmas Carol".

So I'll give these charities a tip, free of charge. Stuff your ads up your arse until after Christmas when everyone is bloated with pies, and have had enough of presents. Then ask them for cash and presents that they don't want so you can sell them on Ebay or something.Actually, here is a better plan. A new governmental fund. It is completely up to you whether you donate or not. When you donate it goes into a big box that is only used for charities. Then the government can jolly out the money to the most needy causes. That way we only have 1 charity for looking after kids, 1 for animals, 1 for homeless people and maybe one for the elderly. Any other countries problems can come last in my book. Charity begins at home. And that's how it should be.

Wednesday, 17 December 2008

Tonight I have made a monumental breakthrough. This is big, this is bigger than big. This is massive.

There is a direct correlation between the angle of your body, the angle of your knee joint and IQ.

It's true, there are no two ways about it. Think about it for a second. As we evolved, we became more clever and then after a couple of thousand years we are now able to walk upright. But thats evolution over many years, so how can I prove it for anybody, right now? It's really simple.It is all to do with the way you stand. Each of us should have engrained in us that picture of the passage of man, where the monkey turns into somebody who works in an office, I am not sure if monkeys would be proud of this but there we go. At least we get to sit in the warm drinking coffee, while they sit in a tree eating bananas for free, and they dont have mortgages on the tree, and they dont have to pay for the bananas. But we are better off. Obviously.

Anyway, IQ is linked to how you stand and it'll be easier if you actually try this too. Let's say you are a retard (for the purposes of this exercise), with an IQ of 90. So bend your body in 90 degrees (bow basically). Now bend your knees so they are at 90 degrees too. Congratualtions. Knuckles on the floor are they for more support? Look like a Neanderthal? There you go!

Now the next bit, a friend of mine pointed out that IQ also relates to speech, namely in that the pitch, vocabulary and volume, also match the IQ number. So let's take your average stupid person with an IQ of 90. Unfortunately you won't be able to pitch your voice at 90Hz so go as low as you can, and also you need to speak at 90 decibels. As you are stupid and only have a vocabulary of 90 words, most of them will be "What?". So as you are down there, try it.

Ask a friend or anyone in the office or walking past what you look like, chances are they'll say:

Saturday, 6 December 2008

I was reading to my kids before they went to bed last night and I chose one of their books from the library. Libraries are morgues of paper, all those dusty books, placed on shelves, their names barely visible until you scrape the dust and cobwebs of years from their covers. Then the gleaming realisation that you have found a long lost friend.

Anyway, We got them The 3 Little Pigs which has been retold, as it were, by someone called Ian Beck. This probably isn't his real name as publishers like authors first names to be shorter than their surnames so they look better when titled. I digress. What I would like to draw your attention to, is page 6.

"The second little pig met a man who was carrying sticks. 'Excuse me', he asked, 'would you give me those sticks so I may build myself a house?''Of course,' replied the man, 'I've forgotten why I was carrying them in the first place.'So this pig had found a bloke carrying enough sticks to build a house, and he had forgotten why he was carrying them! I'm sure if I was carrying enough sticks to build a house I'd bloody remember why I was carrying. No. What the mans reply should have been was this:

'Of course, well spoken pig. Your reward for learning the English language in such an eloquent manner shall be these sticks I am carrying for no particular reason, and my role as a plot device is now over.' The man then vanished in a puff of brightly coloured illustration.I think that if stories are going to be blatantly dumbed down for kids they need some kind of explanation. Otherwise in future the kids will think that adults carry stuff for no reason at all in case that homeless pigs may need the materials for a nice detached house in the Lake District.

In future I shall be vetting these story books to avoid all these problems.

Sunday, 30 November 2008

Not content with finding out why we are here, I have expanded my horizons to ask the burning question on nobody's lips....Why are cats here?

Ok, they are fairly cool, they are friendly, fluffy and generally make us happy. There are even websites dedicated to those furry friends of ours, pictures taken by their owners that are cute and funny and what not, but why are they here?

I like cats. Always have. I even had one when I was little. He was great fun. But now I've grown up. I have a small garden, with an even smaller veggie patch for my own amusement. But why is it that all the cats in the area where I live insist on filling it with crap? It seems like the only thing that these cats are here for. Crapping on my sodding lawn! WHY?

There are people who are going to say "They are marking their territory". Well to them I say"Shall I crap in the street then? It's my territory, shall I crap in your garden? its just as much my territory as my garden is to your sodding cats!"

Crapping in my garden I can just about understand, the cats I mean. But why, why crap in my veggie patch? My poor lettuces were shat on then dug up. They crawled underneath my plastic cover and crapped in there, they crapped on my carrots, they crapped on my garden fork, in fact anything to do with me trying to be pro-active and green they have crapped on.

I'm just glad I don't have a Prius, they'd probably take great care in crapping on that. So I guess that's why they are here. To crap on things. Little furry, meat eating, shit machines. The only advantage to me that I can see is that they eat pigeons. That way they save my veggies from being eaten so the bloody cats can shit all over them later.

Monday, 24 November 2008

I have been reading many quotes from philosophers, mainly because back when being a philosopher actually meant something they had a lot of time to think, and they could make a few quid from spouting thoughts about random things. Life was good. Sitting in a bath all day just thinking, and working things out.

Then I came across Voltaire. He was a very wise and very clever man, and lived for a very long time, back then. Some of his quotes are absolutely amazing and are still applicable today. He wrote, for example this nugget:

Behind every successful man stands a surprised mother-in-law.Wow, still means something today. But he did start to lose it at the end of his illustrious career. As is demonstrated by one of quotes towards the end of his life.

I have lived eighty years of life and know nothing for it, but to be resigned and tell myself that flies are born to be eaten by spidersEighty years! Eighty years, and one of the best philosophers of all time, and he said that all he knew was that flies were born to be eaten by spiders. Shit. I could have done that. How about this then?

"All things fall over if you hit them hard enough. Apart from Weebles."

There you go, 26 years of learning compressed into one sentence. Can't wait to see what juicy knowledge I'll have when I'm Eighty!

Philosophers are not all they've cracked up to be. Yes you can read their best bits, but if you read their books they are just normal people really. No-one special other than they can write down some of the things it sounds stupid for someone to say out loud or at least say out loud sober. Don't look for answers in books to life, go down the pub and listen to drunken idiots talk. You may get some good nuggets out of the garbage they normally spout, or at the very least you can be glad you aren't like them. Maybe that's my bit of knowledge that I have gleaned so far.

"Be glad that there are those who feel lower, or who are worse off than you. Just as there are those who are glad they do not feel as bad or doing as badly as you."Thanks for reading,

Monday, 17 November 2008

Has anyone seen that advert about that bloke who had a crash in a car? You know the one:"Richard had a crash.""It wasn't hitting the windscreen that killed Richard""It wasn't his chest hitting the steering wheel that killed Richard."

I thought,"Hmm was it the length of this advert and the labouring of the point?"

It went on,"It wasn't the broken ribs that killed Richard""It wasn't his ribs puncturing his lungs that killed Richard"

At this point I was screaming at the telly"What the hell was it then? For Christs sake give us a bloody clue will you?"

But no, it went on...."It wasn't his ruptured artery that killed Richard"

I was thinking,"Shit is this guy a machine or superman or what?"

it went on...."It wasn't his heart failing that killed Richard"

I was shouting again,"Was he smoking a cigarette?!?!?!"

Then it said"He was not wearing a seatbelt, and that's what killed Richard"

Eeerrrrr, no, don't get me wrong, but for him to have that list of injuries and not die, and then get killed by a loose seatbelt, they sound pretty dangerous to me, I'm not going to wear one. They're lethal. I'm going to take mine out.

Monday, 10 November 2008

Stop yelling and listen. Windows is without doubt the best. With Windows you bang a CD or DVD in you computer, click a few buttons, crack some other disks in for drivers and within an hour and a bit its completely usable. On any hardware you care to use. Every piece of hardware, from really old stuff to really new components there is a Windows driver for it. Ok so you have to pay for it, but that's Ok because everything works, and it is really user friendly. Even your granny can use it. In fact even with the new Mac hardware, you can install Windows on that too. It'll go practically anywhere you want.

Linux is good, but isn't the best by a long way. You might think that it's a long way to Belgium, but that's nothing. I have recently been playing with Fedora 9 and the new Ubuntu 8.10 releases (which no matter what they say are impossibly similar. Only the coffee stain makes the difference) and what has really struck home over the last few days, is that you really, really, need to be a fan to actually like it. These two I have tried are supposed the best for new comers to the OS (shouldn't call it an OS because neither Ubuntu or Fedora are, same as Win95, 98 and ME weren't) and they have been abominable. I can't use my driver disks that came with my hardware....no Linux support, and what I really hate is that there are about 14 different installation methods. I have spent more time in a terminal/command prompt window over the last 4 days than I have in the last 4 years. I used to enjoy this when I had DOS 6.22 and Win 3.11 but I'm tired of it now. I want my desktops to just work. Seriously. When Linux pull their respective digits out of their respective arseholes it'll be good. But just like Wikipedia this is just gonna fail. I'll give it another go in about 12 months, once the RSI has worn off.

Mac OSXWell, well, well. What can I say. I'm impressed. You buy a machine, the OS is on there, it works. End of conversation. Wow. It's based on a random Unix kernel from the birth of Christ and has been altered so much you can't recognise it. But when it's on its home turf it's amazing. I'm not a fanboy. I hate Apple in fact. But their OS is really good. But you try and put it on some other random hardware. What happens then? It doesn't work. At all. And because Apple have their own proprietary kernel you can't just grab linux drivers and jam them in, it won't work. But it does go to show that when you have a specific hardware base and some decent programmers who are full time, just what can be achieved. You also pay the price with this though. Literally. It is expensive and you will lose all your friends, as well as any respect you have. You will also only be liked by other Apple users. Both of them.

But at the end of the day you can't compare Windows and OSX. One is designed for just about any combination of hardware you can possibly imagine. The other is purely for a specific hardware configuration. You can only compare Linux with Windows, and to be honest, the amount of money and research and development that has gone into it really shows. When Linux can speak to hardware manufacturers and and get some real drivers for the specific hardware, that's when I'll switch. But not before.

To be honest I wasn't sure where I was going with this blog, I think I was getting there gradually, but I was distinctly lacking in parking facilities, motorways and the cheap hotel. I did however manage to get hold of a Corby Trouser Press at the end, which, judging by the quality of this article, I used for making toasted cheese sandwiches.

Wednesday, 5 November 2008

Hi All,Last Sunday I went to see the Top Gear Live show and the MPH in London. Absolutely amazing. I had a really good time and we had a really good hotel and whatnot. I recommend it to people. But...I had to drive from where I live to London and back. It's about a million miles or something, and most of that time is spent on the motorway. The more I go on these roads the more and more I appreciate them, we can get from one side of somewhere to the other side of somewhere else unbelievably quickly, even in a Honda Jazz.

But sometimes, just sometimes I think that the people who do the electric information boards are having a laugh. On my way home, again driving down the motorway I saw one of these signs and it said "50mph debris on road". I looked for this debris everywhere, but all I saw was a rusty old Ford Fiesta, and he was doing 60, so it couldn't have been him.

I had to go down an A road. the sign at the side of the road said "Hidden Dips for 1 mile". Well they must have been well hidden, because not once did I see a ketchup or a salsa bottle big enough to cause a hazard. I suppose it could have been some retard from a nutterage, who had escaped and was likely to run out into the middle of the road, but again, there was no-one there worth mentioning, even though I was driving through Surrey.

Anyway, the Top Gear Live show. I would say that the best bit was the "audience in a reasonably priced car". We were all given cards to hold up that were red on one side, and green on the other. Green was left and red was right. The more people held up red cards the more the car turned right and the opposite is also true. But what made it interesting for me was how the throttle worked. The more noise we made the faster the car went.I want this fitted to my car. It makes sense because eventually you would be absolutely screaming through fear and your car would do nothing but try and go faster. It'd be even funnier when the police tried to pull you over, they'd put their sirens on and shout at you to pull over, and you'd be in the car screaming your lungs out, and your engine would be whining and trying to tear itself apart, going faster and faster, and then...

I haven't written in a while, I've been away, sorry.But I had a good time, thanks for asking.

Bonfire/firework night tonight, and that got me thinking once again of all these whingers and whiners who read the Guardian. All those people who write in to OFCOM about abusive programs and about who said what to whom. First of all, there are about a billion other channels to watch or listen to. If you don't like it just change the channel (and the record). Also stop screaming "Won't somebody think of the children?". Our kids are more rounded and psychologically sound with death and serious injury, sarcasm and insinuation than you think.

Every year we take the piss out of some guy a couple hundred years ago who tried to blow up the houses of parliament by doing something he obviously couldn't do. We set off hundreds of tons of gun powder. If he's up there and has finally pulled himself together, he must be screaming at us for taking the mickey out of him. But that's just little stuff compared to what else I have noticed really.

What we do every year for our children is build an effigy of a human, and tell our kids that his name is Guy Fawkes. Then we go in a long procession to a field, with torches and fireworks, where there is the biggest pile of wood you can imagine, and sit this thing on top. All the kids stare at it in wonder of what is going to happen next. We set fire to it. We are performing ritual burning in front of our kids, and they smile and laugh and have bets with each other about which bit of him is going to fall off first.

Tuesday, 21 October 2008

"Three out of four children have seen images on the internet that disturbed them, an NSPCC poll suggests." This is how the BBC news story begins. So it is how I will start mine. It goes on to say that these figures are taken from a poll of visitors to there there4me.com website, which caters for 12-16 year olds.

Ok, yes fine, there are lots of images out there that can disturb children. What got me were these quotes from Zoe Hilton, who is the "policy advisor" for the NSPCC. I shall deal with them individually.

"Children are just a few clicks away from innocently stumbling across upsetting or even dangerous pictures and films such as adult sex scenes, violent dog fights, people self-harming and children being assaulted."

Children are always a few steps\clicks\hops\limps away from all the above all the time. With the exception of "violent dog fights" (as opposed to the non-violent type?). Where in the hell did that come from? But anyway. Any child between the ages of 12 and 16 who has stayed up beyond 9pm has probably already seen all of the above. Even some 12 rated films have these scenes in, so why pick on the internet? Can also someone explain to me what a dangerous picture is? Is it one with really sharp edges? Or one you can fall off quite easily?

Ms Hilton said that ..."every child should be using a computer with child protection software."It's traditionally called a parent.

"High-security parental controls installed in their computers would help shield them. "Do we really need another bunch of controls forced upon us, to teach us what is right and wrong?

"Currently computer manufacturers and retailers leave it to parents to find and install software that filters out material unsuitable for children...."Since when has it been their responsibility? When I buy a PC I don't want to be asked if I have kids so they know what software to put on. Or, why the hell should I have more bloaty ad-ware that will go out of date in 12 months and that I have to renew or whatever?

When I was in high school, I remember quite vividly being shown images of the holocaust, seeing all these people in trenches, dead bodies being rolled into the pit and then covered in lime, people being shot, lined up in bloodied tattered clothes against a wall. I also remember seeing sex scenes in various programs on telly and films. Dog fights is a hard one I admit (unless they mean Spitfire vs. ME109), but then I have never seen one of those videos, and I have been on the internet for a long time. I reckon if I looked for it I'd find it, but I'd have to look for it.

The kids need to be taught to be "web-wise". I have never seen a video or image that I haven't expected to see. I am a true googleite too, and their safe search is fairly good. I don't understand what these kids have been looking for in order to get hardcore porn, self-harm and children being assaulted. In fact....

Hey, this is a thought, what if the children now are so obsessed with finding help that they are now looking for it. They are going to Google and typing "sex advice" or "I self harm please help me" or "I am being abused, help" all 3 I imagine would throw up these images and videos they don't like, and then they finally get to "there4you.com" and sure enough the ones that need help have found abusive stuff on the internet.

I have kids, young kids admittedly, and I have always supervised them on the internet, and they do well. They shall become web-wise. Also if they have a problem they are secure in themselves so they can come and talk to me about whatever, they don't need some webby, self appointed, self regulating, nationalised, pointless group of childless do-gooders helping them. What we actually need are parental classes to help the minority of parents bring up their children. You don't need software for that. In fact its a bad idea. "The software let it through, the software blocks badness, so this must be good"

Ok, last quote:"I've seen violent images I didn't search for. I was freaked out." I'd be freaked out too, if google came up with matches and I hadn't typed anything in.

Friday, 17 October 2008

Scientists are no fun. I put this down to the many, many years of intensive study and homework that they have to do. They are so institutionalised that they just can't see how much fun they can have with the tools they've got.

Take the LHC, or the Large Hadron Collider. What a great idea. But how boring. I am a geek so I am interested to see what kind of things they discover, but what I want to know is what they do with it after 5pm. I would want to collide other things.

All matter is made up of 3 things, Protons, Neutrons and Electrons, so surely it must be possible to fire other stuff around this giant doughnut they have built. Why not have a Large Monkey Collider (or LMC)? It's not the colliding bit I'm interested in really, but I am interested in the noise they'll make as they go round. The sound of an eeeek going by at near light speed would have me in stitches.

OK, maybe that is a tad cruel. What about other things? Like eggs? Or as we all know, Mentos and Diet Coke cause a good reaction, why not fire Mentos one way and Diet Coke the other? The other advantage of this is that the people who have been bitching and whining on about how it will "destroy the world" can't possibly claim that the resultant fizz from such a reaction could do such a thing.

I was talking to a friend of mine last night, and we came up with a plan. When we die, instead of being cremated or whatever, we should be fired around the LHC with photons going the other way, then when a mini black hole is created we'd be sucked into it. How cool would that be? You could also claim to be the fastest corpse on the planet. You wouldn't get a Guinness world record for it though, because you'd have to do the same speed in the other direction.

What about lasers? Some really boring scientists in the USA are using lasers to transmit energy to a device that could possibly work as a "space elevator". Boring. If I had a laser that strong, I'd have to graffiti something. Maybe even write P.T.O on the Moon.

So yeah, scientists need to get out more, have some fun, and stop being so damn practical.

Wednesday, 15 October 2008

Hi All,I got caught speeding. From this moment on I will always obey the speed limit on all roads, as I was caught fairly and squarely by a hidden bloke armed with lasers and cameras in the back of an unmarked van. While I was armed with nothing but a Honda Jazz.

Yeah, right. Don't get me wrong here. I don't drive like a complete nutter, I don't do 50mph past a school (in fact I tend to do far less than 30mph) but I do tend to be a little heavy on my right foot on main roads and motorways.

I have a beef with speeding tickets. The reason is quite simple. It is the only crime that you can be charged with because you have the potential to do more damage to someone or something. When I leave my house, I am not arrested for having the potential to be a burglar, or the potential to be a muggist, or cause damage or something. I was harming nobody. I had the potential to, but I was doing no harm at all.

So anyway, I get a letter through the post to my partner (who owns the car) and its says something like: Please tell us who was driving, if you don't, we'll give you points and a fine. OK, so even though my partner not telling the police who was driving has nothing to do with the offence itself whatsoever, they can give her points on her licence, I'll explain quickly, they can charge me with speeding and give me points, if they photo ID me, and they can still give my partner 3 points for not telling them. How stupid is that? But, it gets better, because here in the UK you do not have to provide evidence that can incriminate yourself. As you can see they have threatened to give you the points and a fine anyway.

At the bottom of the letter it says something like: We have video/photographic evidence. Cool. Where is the evidence then? You expect me to just roll over and take your word for it? I want a picture of my car, date and time stamped with speed, and also the latest calibration test results. I want them now.Don't tell me you've got it, just give it to me, I'm legally required to have it, for god's sake!

So anyway, when all's said and done, I'm gonna ask for the pictures and the calibration test results and then pay my fine and take my points.All because some anoraks in the early 1900's decided that 30 was far too fast for their cars or their roads. Even though now we have cars that can stop in half the distance, if anything were to happen.

Another thing I'll mention, If some idiot wants to step out in front of a moving car, that's fine by me. I'm a car, on a road, you are a small squishy human.It doesn't matter what speed I'm doing, if you don't walk into the road while I'm coming down it, I can safely say I won't hit you, ok?

At 50mph You'll mostly dieAt 40mph You'll mostly surviveAt 30mph You'll have bruisingAt 15mph I'll stop the car, get out, and give you a mouthful of abuse, and maybe even cause the injuries you would have had at 50, 40 or 30mph.

If you don't step in front of a car regardless of speed you will 100% fail to incur any injuries at all.

Notice that in this article I haven't mentioned police catching burglars (caught mine yet?), old people driving very badly or slowly or down the motorway towards you, drunk drivers, and other more dangerous drivers than little old me, a reasonably fit young gentleman with fairly good reaction times, and also someone who has never had an accident on 2 or 4 wheels involving someone else (ok, I fell off my motorbike twice, it was wet and icy, I was doing under 20mph and I grazed my knees, and broke my wing mirrors) since I have started with motor vehicles.

Sunday, 5 October 2008

I was thinking to myself the other day on the birth of social evolution (yes I am that type of person)and then thought occured to me that evolution occurs in 5 easy stages, and they are the 5 questions we are taught at a very early age. I remember sitting in an old victorian building being force fed times tables, phonetics, numbersand all other sorts of useful stuff, and the 5 most important questions that you can ever ask.

If you haven't already guessed they are Who?, What?, Why?, When? and Where?.The reason why these are so important to social evolution are as follows.We are strange creatures, we are probably the only animal that asks itself "Who am I?" Some famous Greek bloke said "I think, therefore I am" It is the first stage of Evolution. "Who am I?" is not just a question of your name, but a realisation that you are more than just an entity, that you have self-realisation, you have a purpose and life and the ability to ask that question. You don't see Dogs asking that question, they are not self-aware. They don't think to themselves "I am a Dog, I am a four legged animal that likes pissing against lamp posts." They live for the moment, they have no purpose other than to just be a Dog. So the first step in any Social Evolution is, Who?

Now we know who we are, the next step is to "discover" the world we live in. The next logical question is "What?" as in, "What the hell is that I've just stepped in?"In order to fully understand the world you live in you need to ask questions like "What?" You name things, and personify them in order to get a grip on what the world is like around you.

Closely followed by "What?" is "Why?". All parents dread this word coming from their childrens lips, as the amount of "why's" is limitless. Even scientists today are asking themselves why certain things happen the way they do. "Why?" is always the start of investigation. We have named everything now, so lets find out why things are the way they are.Why is it that when you are standing at a bus stop, and the bus is late, that you can light a cigarette and within 2 puffs it arrives? That's a small why. How about...Why is it that a photon is released from the sun, takes 8 minutes to get to Earth, avoiding planets, dust, metorites, satellites, gets reflected by the Earth's atmosphere, at the right angle, while the Earth is rotating at 10,000MPH, missing all clouds and other atmospheric debris, then comes down through the air and through a gap in your curtain 4mm wide and manages to shine right into the very centre of your eyeball, 1 hour before your alarm goes off? Thats a big why. And when I find out why, I'll buy new curtains.

Next one is "When?". To quote Douglas Adams, "Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so".Time has always been strange, it has always been around, but it wasn't until recently that we created "time zones" for various places round the world, and actually worked out what "time" it actually was. Before all this we went by the stars, sunrise and sunset, phases of the moon. But the reason why this is important in the evolution is because it made us realise that there was a pattern and a rhythm to all things, and there was a regularity to everything. This was important for agriculture, sciences, and all sorts of other applications that caused us to move forward as a species.

Last is "Where?". When I came up with this idea, I found it increadibly hard to fit this pattern in with my thoery of "Social Evolution". But then I had a brainwave."Where shall we have lunch?". Let me explain. We've been through all the other questions, we know who we are, what other things are, why they are, and when we can do things. A where question assumes that we are discovering our literal place in the world, as well as everything else. But to forward our evolution, we need somewhere to socialise. To pass on information, and where better than a Resturant?Someone else has thought "Who shall I get the food from?", "What shall we get off them", "Why do I need these ingredients?", "When shall I open?". All we need to know is "Where shall we have lunch?". All the hard work has been done for us. We have reached the final stage in Social Evolution. We never hear of Dogs saying "hmmmm, where shall I have lunch?" because they haven't gone through all the other stages.

Hi all I have had reports from regular readers of my column that my grammar sucks as I epically fail at the correct usage of commas especially and putting them where they are not needed and sometimes not including them where they are so in order to redress the balance I have written this piece with no punctuation at all just to prove the point that sometimes it is better to overdo something rather than not do something at all this of course does not apply to cooking driving or diving especially diving that could be quite lethal and should cause a lot more of a stir than me putting commas where they shouldnt be or no commas where there should be how I can actively type in a null amount of commas is beyond me but there you go but anyway I digress normal service will be resumed next time when I shall be reinstating the use of punctuation as it makes it so much bloody easier to read hell even txt spk has punctuation for crying out loud thanks for reading

Friday, 3 October 2008

Shopping, hate it or loath it, you can't not do it. It's a fact of life. Like Swiss Rolls. Or cheese. But anyway...

I've just done a "manly shop", this is basically where you go into town, pop into the shop you know where an item is, buy it, then return to your place of residence. This can take anywhere between 30mins to an hour. This is entirely dependant on where you need to go to get such item, the time spent in the shop is worked out thusly:

T = (Q + A) / B

Where T is the total amount of time taken, Q is the queing time, A is the amount of time it takes you to get annoyed and B is the amount of time it takes to eat a burger. Ok it needs a bit of work. But the point is the bloke (man, git etc...) goes straight in gets what he wants then leaves.

Women do this slightly differently, and to be honest I was going to work out an equation to this but I didn't have a clue what these women I was stalking around the Shopping centre were doing. They didn't seem to know what they wanted, or where to get it from, or how long they'd take to get it, how much it would cost me, sorry, their other halfs.

I think I have worked this out. 10000 years ago, women didn't have shops but spent their time, galavanting doing easy jobs, like hunting bushes, trees and the like for fruit. Some of which were very vicious. The men, however, hunted animals. Big, hairy, animals. With teeth. So we ran up to them, stabbed them in the ass and ran home before anyone else turned up. We needed to be quick.

So next time you are shopping with a girl, just remember all she's thinking about is where the next bit of fruit is coming from, where you are thinking where the tiger was last time you saw it.Of course, nowadays we have no tigers...so its just things...but women I believe are still thinking about fruit.

Saturday, 27 September 2008

News just in.....Smoking is bad for you!Shock horror! I've never heard that before!

Over here in the UK the powers that be (whoever they are) have decided to put pictures on all cigarette/cigar/tobacco packets, in order that we can see the damage for ourselves.Every time we take out our packet of whatever, we will see these images, we are supposed to think "Oh crap, if I smoke this stuff I'll end up looking like this"

OK, I can see their point. Alan Johnson told the BBC"We do think it will help the number of people, who want to give up to smoking - the vast majority of smokers want to give up - and this will give them an extra push,"

That's fine, I can cope with that, but what I want is equality!I want to see pictures of pissed people on bottles of beer/wine/spirits. Why not? It's along a similar vein?

If you drink your liver will look like this...If you drink you will look like this....If you drink tizer, your urine will look like this...

I think this is fair. What about other things, like fast food? If we're gonna go putting pictures of the results of over-indulgence on products, why not pictures of fat bastards on Macdonalds wrappers? Why not pictures of Alice Cooper or the band KISS or even Barbara Cartland on make-up products?

Personally, I don't smoke that much, outside, no kids around, and I have accepted that it's not the healthiest thing in the world, and I'm not proud of it. It's just something I do. I don't want to see autopsy pictures while I'm doing it.

Monday, 22 September 2008

I am not fat. I am one of these annoying gits who can eat just about any amount of anything greasy and stay thin. My partner says this is particularly annoying, as she has to "watch what she eats"

What she doesn't know is that I also have to watch what I eat...and to be honest, seeing the eighth big mac enter my body is not necessarily a pleasant thing to see.And this brings me neatly on to biscuits...

I am to biscuit barrels, as Harold Shipman was to old peoples homes. I eat a *large* amount of biscuits. It's not their fault that I enjoy their sugary goodness. I have often found myself munching my way through 2 packets of bourbons, or their albino cousin the custard cream.I do not mourn for them, that would be silly. But I am trying to rid the world of biscuits, as a one man army. I am attempting biscuit-icide on my own.

If any of you have been down to a supermarket and there are no biscuits, you know who to blame. I once went off them for a week and ASDA had to drop their profit declaration to their share holders.

I'm off now to Tesco's where they pride themselves on their biscuit selection boxes.

How insane is this for a situation? I can be sat down on a comfy sofa, without the TV on, without a book or music, or a computer, or any form of "entertainment" whatsoever and not be...bored.

I will sit there, just being...well just being. And it's great. One of life's little luxuries.But if someone gives me a mind-numbing task I have this absolute overwhelming feeling of boredom. This is odd. I have been given something to do and I am bored, even though I have less boring times sitting doing absolutely nothing but breathing.

I am not sure if this is just me or not. Maybe the problem is that the task itself is seemingly endless. It is not a case of boredom as such but just that it is a lack of motivation. Maybe I cannot be motivated to reach the end of this seemingly endless task, and I am therefore bored with it. When I am sat, just existing, in the nice "Trev-shaped" dent in my sofa I know that it won't be for long so I just make the most of it.

So my solution to this is to do my "boring" tasks in bite size lumps in between "day-dreams". Unfortunately my job doesn't allow this, so I have come up with an interesting way to accomplish both. I day-dream all the time, while I do my task, and I am very happy with the situation. Although occasionally it is unnerving seeing valkyries riding dragons across my monitor, while I am trying to enter SAN information from a site...again.

Please feel free to try my solution yourself at work, or home or where-ever. Anywhere you do a boring job, try to day dream while you do it, you'll find the day passes quicker.

Please don't do this when you are driving. An excuse of "Sorry officer, I didn't see the old bloke walking across the road because a giant hamster was barbecuing a chicken that looked like David Beckham was blocking my view" will probably not work.

Friday, 19 September 2008

World banking this time. What a palaver! I just want to put money in, and then when I get to a hole in the wall at 3am I want to be able to get out a tenner for a god awful kebab and some soggy chips covered in grease.

Now the whole point about a bank is that loads of people put money in, as long as you all promise not to take all your money out at the same time. When this happens its called a "run". The bank cannot physically hold all that cash, most of it doesn't actually exist, and some of it has gone on wages for the staff and investments to pay the bonuses at Christmas.

What happens then? Well stock prices in the bank start falling, more people withdraw their money, which the bank has to honour, and the stocks fall faster. Two things happen then, one the bank (and its debt) is bought by a bigger bank, or the bank closes its doors for good.See Northern Rock, this was bought by the UK Government, with our money. We bought the bank with our own money, so we could have our own money back.

This time it was different, this time it was loans. You take a loan out for say 10000 at 10% the bank gives it to you. The bank then says that it has 11000, because that is the amount that you'd pay back. so it can now loan 11000 to someone else.This can happen forever. But! What if interest rates or cost of living goes up (see Bank of England and oil pricing in the UK) People can no longer afford to pay back the loans, the Banks no longer have the cash, and you get freefall.

The worrying thing is, in order to get out of this hole where we have 2 or 3 major banks crashing out, the UK Government suspended competition law, so the other bigger banks could buy the smaller ones out, to stop this problem. Who caused the issue in the first place? The banks!

I am no expert (as you can see), and this is only very lightly described as I can't be fagged to find sources and whatnot, but we all need to keep an eye on which bank is buying what so we know who's in charge.

Pre-ordering starts 30th Sept, with shipping dates in November. There are only 3000 units in the first batch so get going!

In UK money it's near as makes no difference £200, so if you are thinking about getting an EEEpc or an AA1 or whatever, please check this thing out first. I'd even suggest checking it out before considering a low-end, entry level, laptop.

For the geeks amoung us, there is also a "motherboard" type effort that has the same chipset and what-not called the BeagleBoard (go here... http://beagleboard.org/). Cost is $150. So that's about £85 now I guess. I'm not going to check. But if you can imagine, one of these beagleboards, an 8.5" lcd screen, a cheap small usb keyboard, small mouse and a USB dongle and wireless dongle, you can make your own. It'll come to about the same. But you can really geek out and say you built your own, and you'll get that warm fuzzy feeling inside.

First of all, hello and welcome to my blog. If you are reading this then it means that not only do you have a grasp of English, but you also have far too much time on your hands.

In my early days, I used to watch F1 with a sense of awe, I remember the days when Michael Schumacher drove a Benneton, and how excited I was when he managed to win against the odds. But now fast forward to today...

The race last week, Hamilton cut the chicane, allowed Raikkonen through then retook him later on. I have been reading in messageboards, fan forums and all sorts, about the decision to penalise Hamilton with a 25 second penalty after the race was completed.25 seconds! The decision for the time was the length of time it would take someone to do a drive through penalty, that being the normal way of resolving these things while on the track.Maclaren asked the race director (Charlie Whiting) if Hamilton had done enough after cutting the corner, allowing Raikkonen through, and Charlie said in his opinion he had. The RACE DIRECTOR said that he had. But apparently Charlie knows nothing.

The race progressed Raikonnen crashed out anyway, and Hamilton went through to win. Whoopee I thought. Until the next day when I heard news that some bunch of idiots had penalised him for the manouver. Why couldn't they have said this at the time? The problem could have been fixed straight away! "Sorry Maclaren, Hamilton needs to let him through again or get a drive through"

But they decided to hold the decision till after the race, the people who made the decision were not even present at the race, and apparently have no grasp for the mentality behind the drivers.

I admit my first reaction to the 'incident' was to say "Give him room Hamilton!" so in my mind he did deserve a penalty. But for Maclaren to not be able to check this at the time beggers belief. Here is my solution, get the suits down at the track, let them make a decision straight away, and once the winner crosses the line, that's it. Race over.If the people making the decisions are not at the track then quite frankly any decision made by them after the race is bunk.